~ Reliving Childhood One Week at a Time

Tag Archives: Jon

Oomph. It’s been awhile since I’ve actually made a post. Sarah and I actually watched Robin Hood quite some time ago, but then I got caught up with a few conventions and work so I haven’t had time to write up my thoughts on anything.

Again, Robin Hood is one of those movies I remember as a kid. Vaguely. In the sense that every once in awhile, I suddenly have the song about “Robin Hood and Little John walkin’ through the forest…” Something, something, something, something “Ooh de lally, Ooh de lally. Golly what a day.”

Ok. I suppose I don’t really remember much. I remembered that Robin was a fox. And there was a foxy fox for Maid Marian.

Phil Harris was apparently back as Little John, although I still can’t hear him as anything except Baloo. I blame Tale Spin. Monica Evans was the voice for Maid Marian and had also done one of the geese in Aristocats, but I didn’t watch much of that growing up, so that voice didn’t have strong associations for me.

As far as the plot goes, well, I’d like to compare it to the “true” version of Robin Hood, but I’m not quite certain I know what that entails exactly. There’s been a lot of renditions of the classic story and I’m not sure which elements have been added in various versions. But I’m pretty sure that Robin didn’t lose his arms in battle but grow himself a nice pair of boobs.

I’m pretty sure that Robin was supposed to have a band of Merry Men, but in the Disney retelling, he’s a bit of a loner except for his hetero-life mate Little John. I suppose you could say that he did have a group of merry children helping him out along the way. Perhaps when they grow up they can be some merry men for him. With or without tights. Except Toby the Turtle. Because we all know turtles grow up to be ninjas when they hit their teens.

Another discrepancy in this one is that Prince John was apparently helped out, or perhaps led on by Sir Hiss who, as with Kaa, the snake in Jungle Book had the magic power to hypnotize people. I’m pretty sure as a kid I totally bought into the idea that snakes could do that. I’m not sure when I figured out they didn’t. Perhaps it was when I learned that snakes bite. It hurts.

Although I didn’t recall it too much before rewatching this movie, the song “Phony Prince of England” does get stuck in my head a lot now. Yes, the lyrics to that has a lot of “somethings” in it too.

The era of Disney we’re in right now is in many ways the ones I remember as a child. I remember watching Jungle Book and 101 Dalmatians frequently as well as several of the later movies, but somehow, there’s a few films in there that, although I know they’re popular and I know I saw them, it wasn’t often. Aristocats is one of those movies; I have a vague recollection of it, but nothing coherent.

This movie is definitely a weird one. It’s like a blend of 101 Dalmatians and Lady & The Tramp. With cats. Which is cool. I like cats.

The plot of the movie is pretty straightforward. A crazy cat lady with no living relatives decides to leave her fortune to her cats instead of her hard working butler. He finds out, and decides to dispose of the cats so he can apparently inherit the riches. I’m not sure why crazy cay lady wouldn’t just find some new cats to dote upon thereby resurrecting the problem, especially since she wasn’t made to appear ill and obviously had several good years of life left.

Either way, he spirits the cat family away and dumps them near a creek. The family then has the journey home which is where the 101 Dalmatians parallel comes in. As they’re leaving, they meet Thomas O’Malley (the alley cat) who, as a ruffian tries to woo the high bred woman (paralleling Lady & The Tramp).

O’Malley is voiced by Phil Harris who I still can’t listen to without thinking of Baloo from Jungle Book.

Eventually the group makes it home after meeting some geese, their drunk uncle, and some jazz playing cats. Bad Mr. Butler nabs them and hides them in a sack in the oven and then tries to shove them in a crate that he ships to Timbuktu. But O’Malley rescues them and instead, the Butler falls in the crate and goes off for an extended vacation.

Timbuktu is one of those odd places that I know more references to it than I actually know about it. I know only one fact about Timbuktu and that’s that it’s a real place, not just some fictional place that’s just denoted to mean really far away (like the mythical land of B.F.E.). Rather, I know the name Timbuktu from this movie and Garfield since Timbuktu is where Garfield was always attempting to ship Nermal to.

Another geographical fact I remember from Garfield (this one’s not a “fact” in the sense of being true though… I think) is that Wyoming means “No state here” in some language or another. Why this sticks in my brain? I have no idea.

Other odd things popping up in my mind: The horse’s name in this movie is apparently Frou-Frou. Which happens to be the name of a band one of my favorite singers, Imogen Heap, belonged to awhile back. Is there a connection? Probably not directly.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about this movie. Sorry for the delays in posting!

So. Jungle Book. Lemme tell you about a story about Sarah’s and my relationship with this movie.

About three years ago, Sarah and I were hanging out and for some reason we were talking about Disney movies. Weird. I know. And somehow, it turned to Jungle Book. And we both realized that, although we both grew up on quite a bit of Disney, this movie included, neither of us could remember what the hell it was about.

So we ran over to my parents house, grabbed the VHS they keep around for when family with little kids come over, and watched it.

Fast forward to this past weekend when we watched this movie for the blog, and we still couldn’t have told you what it was about. And I’m sure in a year, I won’t be able to tell you again. Why? Because, just like Sword in the Stone, this movie has a beginning, an end, and everything in between really doesn’t have anything to do with either.

The beginning is about a young human boy who is abandoned in the forest. He grows up with the animals and, at a tender young age, meets Jane. Wait. That’s not right. I’m thinking Tarzan.

The child, Mowgli, grows up with the animals and, at a tender young age, is voted out of the jungle because Shere Khan, a human hating tiger, is in that neck of the woods and is likely to eat the young lad. So to keep him safe, they decide he needs to go live in a human village. Either that, or the moral is that the expediency of tossing out an outsider to protect your own is just. Anyway, so the panther that originally found him, Bagheera, takes him off.

First, the two encounter a sneaky snake, Kaa, voiced by Sterling Holloway (Pooh) who tries to eat him. Because bony little human boys are delicious. What I took away from this is that the jungle was dangerous regardless of Shere Khan. But Khan is like, super badass, so I guess the comparison is moot.

Regardless, they sneak by him, and Bagheera and Mowgli get in a fight because Mowgli thinks he’s invincible and will take out a tiger. I guess he’s hitting puberty?

So Mowgli takes off only to meet a bear. But it’s a friendly bear. In fact, it’s a pretty awesome bear. It’s Baloo. I have a particular fondness for this bear, although not because of this movie, but because of the spinoff using the Jungle Book characters that appeared in 1990: Tale Spin. I can’t much remember what that was about either, but I know I did watch a lot of it as a child.

Baloo teaches him to be a bear with a really memorable song, but then some damn dirty apes kidnap Mowgli and there’s another good song. They want him to teach them to make fire. But he doesn’t know and Baloo comes to steal him back anyway. Baloo is convinced that Mowgli needs to go back to the man village, so there’s some direction back towards the plot, but then Mowgli runs off again only to get a Kaa redux. Thanks to Shere Khan interrupting Mowgli escapes only to run off into the forbidden lands (I suspect hyenas lurk there) and meet some buzzards.

This is another bit that, although the plot doesn’t stick with me, always did. The buzzards sit around taking about what they want to do. Of course the other buzzards are all, “I dunno. Wot you wanna do?” So whenever someone pulls that with me, I always respond “Ah, now don’t start that again.”

Most people don’t know what I’m talking about.

Mowgli wanders by and is feeling rather sad so they sing him a barbershop quartet song which is interrupted by Shere Khan who, surprise! wants to eat Mowgli. Baloo and Bagheera show up and there’s a rather unexciting battle with lots of hair pulling. Until lightning strikes some brush. Simba and Scar fight while everything’s on fire…. uh… Wrong movie again.

They all fight until Mowgli ties a burning branch to the tiger’s tail which apparently scares him off.

After the duel, they drop by a town and he sees a girl. Apparently he gets twitterpated because he completely forgets everything about the jungle and runs off after the girl (another Bechdel Test failure).

Oddly enough, there’s some precedent for this. The most famous is Victor of Aveyron. A child grew up in a forest in France and entered the town. He was adopted but never had a very good time of it. Language, for the most part, proved beyond his grasp and he never fit in.

But the movie doesn’t show any of that. Instead, it cuts off with him skirt chasing. And that’s why it’s a kids movie.

Classic story. King Arthur is probably one of the best known kings there’s been. Which is interesting. Because there’s debate to whether or not he actually existed. Contemporary references to him are sparse, vague, and many historians aren’t convinced. Whatever. He’s in good company.

The main story that people know has something to do with killer rabbits and holy hand grenades. There’s lots of components to the legend but the most enduring part is the eponymous portion for this movie: The pulling of the sword from the stone. Which has almost nothing to do with this movie.

Really, this movie can be summed up as follows: Arthur is a squire for a jerk. Merlin knows he’s going to make it big and thus goes all Obi-Wan to train the boy. Things happen. He pulls the sword from the stone and lives happily ever after.

There’s not even a damsel in distress. As with so many other Disney movies, this one bombs the Bechdel Test. Instead, we get a highly educated owl, Archimedes. I really like this little guy. Partly because he shares a voice actor with Rabbit from the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh which we’ll get to in another decade or so.

I do have to say I like Merlin in this too. He’s rather eccentric, but he’s very big on the brain over brawn. So he turns him into a fish, squirrel, and bird which puts him in situations he has to think his way out of since it’s such an unfamiliar situation. He teaches him things like gravity, which won’t be discovered for a few hundred years. But Merlin’s up on it, because he’s a time traveler.

After going through all this training, Arthur ends up still being a squire to Jerk who takes them to a tournament in London which will determine who the king is. Because apparently everyone forgot that the rightful king is supposed to be the one that pulls the sword from the stone. Which Arthur does.

And suddenly the plot (and everyone else) forgets about anything that’s gone on and it’s all about the sword being pulled. Which wasn’t pulled out thanks to anything Merlin taught Arthur, but rather, due to a complete brain fart. Way to subvert the majority of the movie.

There’s a lot of good points to this movie, but the rather random feeling to the whole movie was kinda a buzzkill.

Meanwhile, Sarah’s still in Disney Land so she’ll be catching up on posts when she gets back. As a note, while writing this post she sent me a text saying “Oh my gosh, I’m going to need some convincing to catch up on blog posts”. So if you like reading this blog, please, leave a comment or share this site so we know that the traffic we see isn’t just google bots.

Looks like there won’t be a post this week either. Sarah and I took a trip to Marceline, MO (Walt’s childhood home). She’ll have some pictures of that and I’m sure she’ll write up a post on it, but for now, she’s finishing up a 280 page paper for her master’s degree, so wish her luck.

In the meantime, walking around a midwest town on a sunny day with it being 90º out yesterday took its toll. We’d planned on doing a bit of catching up last night, but I ended up with no energy, a migraine, and 11 hours of sleep last night to recover. What a wonderful cinco de Mayo.

With any luck, we’ll be able to get in at least one or two movies next weekend between her graduation and leaving on a well deserved vacation.

I’ve been busy this week traveling for work and Sarah is busy with her final semester of grad school + moving. As a result, we’re not able to get together this week. With any luck we’ll be able to find some time during the week, but it’s not looking likely either. So we may be holding off until next weekend and doing a double feature.

Although the tagline Sarah and I came up with was “reliving childhood”, 101 Dalmatians is the first of the movies I’ve felt was a real part of my childhood. Although I’d seen most of the films up till now, they weren’t ones that my family had on VHS. This one we did.

Going into this movie, I expected that knowing what was happening next would make me more likely to fall asleep in the same manner that I can’t actually sit down and watch Star Wars anymore because I’ve seen it so many times I’m nearly asleep before the opening scroll is finished.

But as we watched this film, I found myself far more engaged with it than most of the rest of what we’ve watched thus far. This may have also had something to do with the fact that even among the Disney movies I grew up on, 101 Dalmations was a favorite. I even had a poster on the wall in my bedroom for quite some time.

As I used to go to sleep, in the darkness of the room, I used to stare at the patterns of spots on the puppies. Much like the face of a quintissential ghost made out of a sheet, I often saw faces in those spots. Some looked happy. Some looked angry. Many looked confused.

On nights I couldn’t sleep, I often wondered how many “faces” there were on the poster. Since the faces were composed of three spots arranged in a triangle, with two being the eyes and one being the mouth, should I count it if you “rotated” the triangle to change which were which? I no longer have the poster, but the question still intrigues me as a mathematical puzzle. Perhaps I’ll have to really sit down and consider it one day.

Regardless, the idea of seeing images from random placements and orientations of spots is a phenomenon we’ve discussed before. It’s pariedolia. Our minds are tuned to extract useful information from the general noise of the world, and this phenemenon is simply that process reaching too far and attributing meaning to nonsense.

Of course, it’s not always meaningless. Knowing that we have this propensity to see faces and ascribe meaning and emotion to them allowed animators in this movie to make Cruella DeVil the “evil thing” she was. For example, her car took on the appearance of an angry glaring face thanks to its headlights.

Cruella is also always shown in thick furs that make her silohette much larger than her true appearance. Again, our subconscious has something to say about this: Large things are more apt to be perceived as dangerous. Interestingly enough, the opposite is true. A recent study showed that when subjects were shown various images of hands holding various objects, we tend to anticipate that the bearer of someone holding a gun was larger than they actually were and larger than they, on average, rated the bearers of other objects. And by no small amount; the amount was somewhere between 10 and 20%.

I think this is why I have always liked Cruella as a villain. She doesn’t just get under your skin. She’s in your mind! She also has an annoying tendency of being omnipresent. Puppies are being born? She just happens to be in the neighborhood.

In the intro to the DVD, they featured an anti-smoking segment with Cruella’s green haze of smoke and Pongo wrinkling his nose with the tagline “Don’t be Cruel” (har har). Of course, it’s a bit of an oversight that Roger’s smoking is never depicted as particularly loathsome. I suppose the message is that smoking pipes that don’t leave green clouds is ok?

Anyway, plot.

Pongo and Roger live together and Pongo’s upset because he doesn’t get to do much so he decides to hook Roger up. The criteria? The woman should be pretty. That is all. Good to know dogs are shallow too (“fifteen puddles stolen? Balderdash!”).

He manages to find him a suitable mate and they fall madly in pond together. Oh, and she has a dalmation named Perdita for a dog too. Which is good. Those little dogs that fit in a purse are just dumb. Like dauchhunds. Wretched little things they are.

Pongo and Perdita end up having quite the litter together. Fifteen puppies. And Cruella wants ’em. But Roger, who has an understandable dislike for her, refuses to sell.

So Cruella storms off (on the stormy night) and hires a pair of thieves (the bumbling sort that try to break into the home of kids that are Home Alone) to steal the puppies. They do, and take them to the DeVil mansion in suffolk along with 84 other puppies which were “bought and paid for” legally. Cruella plans to turn them into coats, but Pongo and Perdita use wrangle up the Lady & the Tramp crew and some other dogs to find ’em.

When Pongo and Perdita learn where their puppies are, they set off to rescue them. After a montage they arrive just as the puppies make their escape. The two decide to adopt all the puppies and begin the trek back to London. Cruella and her sneakthieves chase them.

A few towns away, they plan to catch a moving van back to London, but Cruella cruises the street between their hideout and the van. So Pongo gets the bright idea of covering themselves in soot to look like Labradors. As if 101 Labradors wouldn’t be in any way suspicious. Especially if 17 of them had collars that were covered with soot…

But the baddies don’t appear to notice (I’m pretty sure it’s because Cruella had motor mania) at least until they get dripped on by melting snow and ice from the roofs, washing off the soot.

This prompts a furious car chase in which Cruella and the baddies end up crashed in a ditch, but otherwise unharmed.

The dogs all make it home and everything is peachy keen. Roger and Anita decide to keep all the puppies and move out to the country to start a dalmation plantation. Where they’ll presumably make lots more. And do what with them? Uh, I’m not sure, but I bet I know a buyer.

In fact, I bet Cruella would want to be a majority shareholder given she legally owned the vast majority of their puppy capitol. But I guess that slipped her mind. Perhaps she had a concussion from the crash and didn’t remember anything.

We might also wonder at the effect when Roger’s song about Cruella went viral. It could quite well be taken as slanderous, but then again, this was set in a far less litigious time period. Either that or she did take it to court and the judge decided it was accurate.

Much like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty is another well known fairy tale that Disney adopted. Also like it, the original version was cleansed of many of the more violent and disturbing portions. The story is based on an earlier, Italian fairy tale, “Sola, Luna, e Talia” (“Sun, Moon, and Talia”).

In that version, the princess was not awakened by a kiss. Rather, a king who was out hunting stumbles across her sleeping and, when unable to rouse her, rapes her, impregnating her with twins which she bears while still asleep. When unable to suckle, one instead sucks on her finger drawing out the flax that put her to sleep and she awakens. The queen eventually finds out about this and, instead of having any ire for the king, decides that the children should be cooked and eaten, but the cook substitutes lamb. The fake feast is served to the king. Still, the queen decides to have Talia burned at the stake, but the king discovers this and has the queen burned instead and then marries Talia.

The story ends with the lines: “Lucky people, so ’tis said, He who has luck may go to bed, And bliss will rain upon his head.”

The moral? If you’re lucky, you can be a rapist and good things will happen!

Yes. This is what Disney is based on.

But things were changed. Like the name of the princess. She is now named Aurora after the morning dawn…. Of course, aurorae have nothing to do with the dawn. Rather they are glowing interactions when charged particles blown off the sun during highly energetic electromagnetic events and then funneled down through the Earth’s atmosphere, mostly at the poles, by magnetic fields. When they strike the particles in our atmosphere, it ionizes them and upon recombination, light is emitted.

Typically, this phenomenon is limited to the far northern latitudes, but when the Sun gets really violent, they can be seen at much lower latitudes. Just last year, a good solar storm made them visible here in Missouri where I spotted them as a glowing red cloud in the Northern sky. In 1859, there was a solar storm that was so large aurorae were even seen at latitudes as low as the Caribbean! This was known as the Carrington event and was caused by a solar flare that was so bright, it was visible to the naked eye.

Anyway, the princess’ name again changes as she’s adopted by three fairy godmothers who call her Briar Rose to hide her from the evil Maleficent who is a self described mistress of all evil. Maleficent is a character that I quite like, ultimately because of her major role in the Kingdom Hearts series.

She puts a curse on the pricess that will cause her to die when she pricks her finger on a spinning wheel on her 16th birthday. But one of the fairy godmothers weakens the curse with her magic making her fall asleep until kissed by her True Love™.

On her 16th birthday, when Maleficent’s curse is to come true, the fairy godmothers finally use their magic to make her a cake and a dress, but it ends up tipping Maleficent off and she ensures the girl finds the spindle.

The fairy godmothers realize they stole the girl away from her family for 16 years and dropped the ball at the last second, decide to stage a cover up by putting the entire kingdom to sleep. Which makes little sense. The princess was already betrothed to the prince. So why would the fairy godmother have required that the kiss be from some stranger and not him? Did she realize right then that the prince wasn’t likely to be in any way in love with her (despite the blessing of beauty and singing from the other two fairies) and that it was truly a marriage of convenience?

If so, then how did they ever expect the true love to find her?

It’s a weak plot point.

But they eventually figure out that the prince, fortunately, happens to be her True Love™, and hasten to rescue him giving him a sword and shield. He hastens to the princess’ rescue and doesn’t rape her, but instead, kisses her, which is still sexual assault. But she retroactively gives consent which I guess makes it more acceptable. Especially since they live Happily Ever After with a distinct lack of eating children.

The art in the movie is very well done in my opinion. It’s one of the more visually attractive movies as I see it. That, combined with the music, makes it a definite favorite. “Once Upon a Dream” is an absolutely gorgeous song. So much so, that at Naka Kon this year, we included it in our formal ball, even though it didn’t fit the main theme of the convention of being from a Japanese anime or video game.

Lady and the Tramp is another of the movies that I haven’t seen in such a long time that I couldn’t remember anything going into it except the scene everyone knows involving meatballs. Hence, I had no real expectations for this film. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.

We start off on Christmas day and Jim Dear gives Darling a dog in a hatbox. It has been surprisingly well behaved that entire time. Not, you know, barking, moving around, or pooping in the box or anything else to give it away that there’s something alive in there. And not a hat. And Darling doesn’t figure it out when she picks up the box to unwrap it and it’s considerably heavier than a hat. Or perhaps she’s just playing along. I bet she’s the kind that peeks the night before….

Anyway, they name her Lady and she’s a high society sort. Collar and everything. She’s respectable. She has a few friends that are upper crust too. The first is Jock, a Scottish Terrier who squirrels bones away like he’s one of those people preparing for the apocalypse. Which makes some sense since the movie supposedly takes place (starting) in 1909 and Earth passed through the tail of Haley’s comet in 1910, causing a panic because astronomers had detected poisonous cyanogen gas in its spectra.

Her other friend is Trusty, a bloodhound with a poor sense of smell who dreams of his glory days with his grandfather, Old Reliable, who he can’t quite remember telling everyone about.

She ends up meeting the Tramp who is definitely the Wrong Sort since he doesn’t have a collar, eats out of trash cans, and isn’t beholden to a family. Instead, he spends his days chasing chickens and springing his fellow strays from the dog catcher. Lady and Tramp run into one another when he’s out on the town and warns Lady that babies moving in means dogs move out. She ignores this best she can but after a terrible misunderstanding with Aunt Sally who comes to babysit so the Dear/Darling pair can have a much needed vacation, the message begins to sink in. Aunt Sally has two Siamese cats who are rather meddling and get Lady in quite a bit of trouble, leading Aunt Sally to muzzle Lady who runs off and meets up with Tramp again. He takes her to the zoo and finds a beaver who reminds me of a particular Gopher (although different voice actors), that snaps it off for her.

The two galavant about the town until Lady is caught by the dog catcher and temporarily put in the pound. I suppose the tags on collars didn’t simply have a return address on them 100 years ago. While there, she learns that Tramp is quite a philanderer. When she gets home, Lady is chained in a dog house and when Tramp stops by she scorns him until a rat sneaks in (which is apparently unheeded by the pair of cats), and Tramp chases after it for her. The rat, apparently, was after the baby. I didn’t know that this was a common occurrence (I have quite a few friends with rats who have no biting problems), but apparently rat bites are a big thing (second example that’s much less squeamish friendly). Still, I don’t buy it. We all know how adorable rats are.

But when the Dear/Darling pair shows up and Lady shows them there was a rat, the whole picture becomes clear and they decide to adopt Tramp. Which he’s surprisingly cool with given how he scorned being tied down, either with another dog or a family. This was the thinnest part of the movie here for me since it was a pretty dramatic shift in characterization without any real motivation. Perhaps it’s because they had puppies and suddenly has to be Responsible.

Apparently BSG lifted one of their most famous lines from Peter Pan. Which is odd that such a notion would even come up in Peter Pan. The entire idea is that of a cyclical story or universe. And here Peter Pan is a story about an unchanging boy who never grows up. Or perhaps not since we all know Peter does grow up to become Robin Williams and then goes back to Neverland to have another epic battle with Hook who apparently the Croc decided wasn’t so tasty. All those sharp metal bits and everything I suppose.

Meanwhile, this version starts with John and Michael acting out stories they heard from their sister, Wendy who learned them from… uh, I’m not sure. But it’s all legit, because she’s got Peter’s shadow who probably told her everything. With shadow puppets or something.

But apparently the stories have turned the kids into rapscallions because dad gets pissed and tells Wendy she’s got to get her own room and leave the nursery. Awful, right? I mean, what kid doesn’t want their own room?

Wendy. That’s who. But Peter drops by looking for his shadow and teaches them all to fly off to Neverland. He probably took a liking to the boys given that Peter was voiced by fellow rapscallion Bobby Driscoll who died at age 31 due to drug abuse which he probably picked up from the Indians the kids hunt in Neverland. Neverland is, of course, somewhere in the vicinity of the second star to the right. In the movie, this is shown as a pair of stars of very nearly equal brightness rather close to one another. Being an astronomer type, I suspect I know which stars these are: Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini (the twins).

I think it’s a pretty good fit, but unfortunately, the star to the right, Castor, isn’t likely to have any planets around it. It’s a quadruple star system. The main star we see has a companion in orbit around it that was discovered in 1678, but both of those stars have other stars in orbit around them in very close orbits. While stars can theoretically survive in multiple star systems (either by being very close in while the other star is very far out or vice versa), the arrangement of all these stars, covering both the close in and the far out, would pull a potential Planet Neverland out of orbit, either throwing it into the parent star, or flinging it out of the system all together.

Anyway, they all get to Neverland, wherever it is, and Hook takes potshots at them. What a jerk. Peter distracts the pirates while Tinkerbell tries to get the Lost Boys to shoot down the Wendy Bird. Apparently this continues the trend of Disney characters having trouble with the idea of what a “bird” looks like. They get over it because Wendy’s not a bird, she’s a mother. And she wants to see the mermaids. And being the gentleman, what with his very fine hat, escorts her to see the mermaids. Who try to kill her because Peter’s apparently so hawt that all the girls want him. So they’re murderous mermaids. Mmm. Alliteration.

On the other side of the island the boys have been captures by the Indians who are threatening to burn them at the stake if they don’t return Princess Tiger Lily (she’s a fierce flower? Mmm. Alliteration). Fortunately, Hook happens to wander into Mermaid Cove to interrogate Tiger Lilly. With the help of some voice impressions (Robin Williams style), Peter tricks Hook’s assistant, Smee, into freeing Tiger Lily long enough for them to escape with the help of the Tick Tock Crock. They return Tiger Lily and have a wild rumpus pow-wow learning all sorts of things about the tribe, which are really more of “Just So Stories” similar to how we learned that wolves howl at the moon because Pecos Bill’s beloved bounced up there in Melody Time.

But again, Tiger Lily starts making eyes at Peter and Wendy gets jealous and convinces her brothers to leave. However, Hook has tricked Tinkerbell into divulging the location of the hideout and sets a nefarious trap for them. The pirates capture the kids and leaves a bomb for Peter. Tinkerbell escapes and saves Peter and the pair rush to save the kids from walking the plank into obviously Crocodile infested waters. Although, one must wonder if the Crocodile would really have gone for kids given that he’d already developed a taste for Hook meat. Beggers can’t be choosers I guess.

But the Croc never gets his tender feast because Peter rescues the kids and initiating the battle with the Final Boss. The pirates lose the battle and Peter captures the ship and flies it back to London somehow. I’m still fuzzy on that one. After all, flying requires happy thoughts and what does a ship think about to make it happy? Again, Melody Time probably has the answers in the Little Toot segment.

They drop off Wendy, John, and Michael and they all go to sleep. Their father finds Wendy asleep at the window. He looks out and sees a cloud pirate ship sailing back towards a pair of bright stars. Of course, he could just be imagining things. After all, people see things in the clouds all the time.